Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

by Carrie Brownstein

  They took themselves seriously, too. It was a strident show. Eventually Corin was able to bring her sense of humor about the world and about herself into her music. But when you’re part of an early movement like she was with Riot Grrrl—where she had to create a space for herself and for her audience, where every show felt like a statement, where before you could play and sing you had to construct a room, one you’d be respected in, wouldn’t get hurt in, a space that allowed for or even acknowledged stories that hadn’t been told before, about sexual assault, sexism, homophobia, and racism, and then, musically, you have to tear that very space down—there’s not a lot of room for joking around. There is a direness in the construction of safety, in the telling of theretofore untold stories. I was really intimidated by those Heavens to Betsy shows. I thought, These people are so cool and so not funny. I knew not to kid around or make some crass, sarcastic comment because, well, these people will fuck you up. Heavens to Betsy came across as the most serious of their peers. You stood up, you listened, and you were quiet. They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you’re in the library of rock right now.

  When Heavens to Betsy finished their set, I walked up to Corin. I told her I wanted to drop out of Western and move to Olympia. She said I should do that, and soon. It felt like an order. She had a spiral notebook and I wrote down my address and told her to keep in touch. Knowing my days in Bellingham were numbered, especially now that my departure had been ordained by this singer I admired, I gave her my father’s address back in Redmond. Now I had to leave; what if Corin reached out to me and I wasn’t there to receive her beck and call?

  My first real band, Excuse 17, would eventually tour the United States with Heavens to Betsy. The audiences were very earnest. And due to the political nature of Heavens to Betsy, it felt like a real dialogue between band and audience, almost like they were bringing a lecture into town. After the shows Corin would spend a lot of time talking to audience members about issues or even objections they had with her music, or with certain lyrics, or with punk or indie music in general. I’d see someone finger-pointing, and I would be annoyed for her. But Corin would always be grateful for the interaction.

  For me, that tour, the music, the whole punk scene, felt very made up as it went along. There was a malleability to it as we vacillated between, experimented with, or claimed identities. If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalized, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist. For a movement that professed to grant one a sense of belonging and solidarity, we were often made aware of our differences. In the span of a single show, or in the reading of a fanzine or the lyric sheet of an album, one’s own experiences could be publicly validated in one instant and then invalidated the very next. There was a real power struggle to find a coalescence and to acknowledge commonalities in our disparities. We wanted to protect one another, to be inoffensive, inclusive, aware of our own shortcomings and faults, to improve and evolve, to make radical changes. Yet there was so much pressure on this single indie and punk movement, one that clearly couldn’t address all forms of personhood or inequality.

  I should acknowledge that I am so grateful for Corin, who, coming up through Riot Grrrl, was never afraid to be unpopular in her beliefs. Who worried so little about what others thought. Because of her I could applaud from the sidelines, I could apply my own analysis to the situation from a safe distance. In our years writing songs together, Corin could make the mess and I could figure out what it meant and what significance it held. It was a good balance. She was plainspoken and trenchant. She could write lyrics to “Dig Me Out” and those three words could tell you everything you needed to know about the feeling of smallness, of being held back, of such a basic desire to tear even a fraction of light into any form of darkness we’re dealt with. I could grapple with titles like Wilderness or Moonless for our seventh record and Corin could just say, “What about The Woods?” and that was that. The Woods, of course! It doesn’t merely describe something—it is something.

  —

  When I dropped out of Western and moved back home with my father, he seemed certain I had ruined my life, that I’d never get back to college, have a job, or amount to anything. He was flummoxed by my indecision and lack of drive. I, on the other hand, was ready to test whether my increasingly thorny disposition could puncture the soft padding of my suburban environs. One catch to that plan—a cliché one, no less—was that I still needed my dad’s help. (Like a lot of middle-class kids, I needed my punk rock and rebellion underwritten by my parents.) I wanted to go to Evergreen State College, not so much to study as to have a valid excuse to be in Olympia. My father agreed to let me live at home as long as I left for college in the fall as planned.

  The interim was difficult. I worked my first real jobs. One was for a catering company that delivered meals to office parks. I’d wheel a cooler full of salads and sandwiches that had been prepared in the wee hours of the morning in a nondescript warehouse into an office lobby, where the receptionist would make an announcement over the PA: “Deli girl is here.” Who was this deli girl to whom she was referring? Oh, it was me. I figured out a way of manipulating the numbers so that I could take a chicken salad and a piece of lemon pound cake home at the end of the day. It was a tiny, ineffectual “fuck you” to “the man.” The woman who trained me had a perky sales routine that she passed on to me in order to boost my numbers. (She also suggested I remove my nose ring, or at the very least clean it on occasion.) She’d tell her customers that she had some pound cake “here” and “here,” pointing at each of her thighs. I laughed at the middle-aged-lady aspect of it until I myself gained ten pounds and was humbled by being college-aged but clearly not in school. Here I was delivering meals-on-wheels to people my age who were already working their way up the corporate ladder. And even though I had never imagined myself on the corporate ladder, I had also never pictured myself peddling tuna fish on sourdough to those who were. So I quit.

  Next I got a job in telemarketing. I worked for a company that helped college kids get summer jobs on cruise ships or fishing up in Alaska. They didn’t actually help anyone get anything, they simply sold a book with a list of phone numbers and addresses. I was pretty great at reading the script into the phone, deviating from it only enough to add my own flair and personal charm. I was making $10 an hour and got promoted to the mail room. There I gave myself daily paper cuts that I used as reminders, witchy whispers to myself letting me know this was only temporary.

  What I wanted was to play music. My friend Jana, whom I had met in a high school chemistry class and who had played bass in Born Naked, was now at the University of Washington. She and I would go out on band auditions, separately or together, showing up at houses where purple-haired punks took us to their basement and we’d run through Agent Orange songs (“Bloodstains”). I never felt scared for my life, only nervous not to play well, self-conscious about my youth and that my preppiness would show through. Everyone wanted to have a girl punk band, especially with L7, Hole, 7 Year Bitch, Lunachicks, and Bikini Kill all getting attention. I auditioned for a band called Not My Son, which pretty much sums up the moniker trend of the time. In high school I had jammed with guys and had been doing a fair bit of auditioning for bands that were co-ed, but I was more excited about the Olympia scene and its kin, about Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile, about Tiger Trap and Autoclave, about bands like Kreviss with eight girls in it, about Slant 6—I wanted to have a girl gang.

  Jana and I would place “musician wanted” ads in The Rocket, Seattle’s music weekly. We were searching for a drummer and a singer. People would reply to the ad and we would go to their houses to audition them. I don’t know why we didn’t make people come to us—perhaps because we didn’t have a drum kit—but it felt like we were enacting some strange variation of the traveling salesman.
We would bring our amps and our guitars and set up in strangers’ basements or living rooms, unloading our wares and doing a musical sales pitch.

  Arriving at each house was the ultimate blind date: no pictures had been exchanged, no MP3s sent over the computer. It was often obvious the second the woman would answer the door that we didn’t have mutual taste in music. Despite this, there was a hopefulness to the process. I’d think, You only like the Indigo Girls and you have your old dreadlock taped to the wall—but we’re both women so this should work out just fine. There was, for example, the carton-of-cigarettes-a-day couple with the husband acting as a proud stage dad, talking up his wife the whole time. The woman was about twenty years older than us, worn-in skin with bleached hair, gray roots on display. She was squat and tough, a 4 × 4 of a human. She sang her heart out over our rudimentary three-chord song, channeling Janis Joplin and Ann Wilson, with a croak and ache of experience that we were years from knowing. Her husband stood next to her during the entire audition, president of a one-person fan club, rooting for her (and his) big break. As if two kids from the suburbs, more Bert and Ernie than Lennon and McCartney, were going to take this woman to the top of the charts.

  We were so often mismatched; the tryouts were a heartbreaking and humbling experience. Every audition was American Idol in miniature, dreamers meeting up with other dreamers, pinning our hopes on the least likely, yet always undeterred.

  Even then, I could still appreciate the moment of simply making sounds with a group of people. There is another place you go to in those instances, and it feels vast, refreshing, like you’re creating your own air to breathe. And even though it’s never going to happen again and there’s a palpable sense of mediocrity, there’s still a connection that you wouldn’t have otherwise, to the sound, to the people. I think for those reasons I’ve always been able to appreciate (but be simultaneously heartbroken by) bar bands and karaoke—you witness the playing or the singing and you know that just being up there, engaged in a momentary artifice, a heightening of self, is sometimes enough to get by, to feel less worn down by, less withered by life. Sometimes it’s everything.

  —

  7 Year Bitch, a rock band of all women, were the heroines of the Seattle scene in the ’90s. They were equally as tough as the rock dudes and they seemed like they partied just as hard. 7 Year Bitch’s music was fierce and growly, and their onstage personas—in particular lead singer Selene Vigil’s—were as amped as their songs. They weren’t as catchy or punk-based as their Olympia counterparts, but I felt an affinity with them because of their geographical proximity to me, like I owed them that loyalty. They exemplified the Seattle sound of the era: their songs had a rough, unadorned quality, as if they were scraped from tree bark. Stefanie Sargent, their young and talented guitarist, had recently died of a heroin overdose. I had no relationship with drugs, nor any idea how one could journey down a dark path only to dig further into blackness; when she overdosed in 1992, the year I had graduated from high school, her death felt like a distant, imperceptible loss, a hollowing that only later I realized would grow each time a musician died.

  One week, scanning The Rocket, as I always did, searching for a band to join, for an ally across the bridge in Seattle, for some way out of Redmond, I came across an ad that read simply: “Girl guitarist wanted, no wanky solos.” That is me, I thought. After all, I don’t even know how to play a solo, let alone a wanky one. I called the number, and Elizabeth Davis from 7 Year Bitch answered.

  I couldn’t believe someone who I thought was fairly famous would be placing an ad in a local paper, that she could just be a normal person on the other end of the line. I shook and talked too fast and laughed when there weren’t any jokes. Here’s how I remember it: I’m lying on my twin bed in my dad’s house on some highly flammable two-tone comforter.

  ELIZABETH: You play guitar?

  CARRIE: Ha ha ha ha. Yes.

  ELIZABETH: It’s raining out.

  CARRIE: I know. Ha ha ha.

  I was hysterical.

  I told her I loved 7 Year Bitch and then I rattled off a bunch of Olympia bands that I liked—Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Beat Happening—until I worried that I sounded too biased toward the town south of us, and then I heard the word “Soundgarden” come out of my mouth. I offered to learn their songs and come over to audition. For the next two days I sat in my room listening to their “Lorna” 7-inch over and over, memorizing the parts, already imagining myself up onstage, on tour, with a new life and new friends. Learning a song from a 7-inch is not easy. There is no pausing, no replay, just picking up and putting down the needle again and again.

  I drove with Katie, my best friend from high school, in my Honda CVCC. It was a death-on-wheels clown car, blueberry-round, stick shift, seats covered in lamb’s wool, updated with an Alpine stereo. We went over the 520 bridge to Seattle and into the Queen Anne neighborhood where Elizabeth lived. My outfit was a classic suburban impersonation of a more urbane look: cutoff jeans with a slight pleat at the top paired with an oversized Hanes T-shirt I took from my dad’s dresser. I also wore one of my father’s suit vests, which swung out from my body like saloon doors. Worst of all was that I had a green J.Crew baseball cap atop my head that I inexplicably wore backward. In a momentary fit of self-consciousness and doubt (and I am relieved that I can write this), I removed the hat before I got out of the car. I was eighteen. Katie waited in the parking lot. I brought my guitar in with me in case Elizabeth might want to spontaneously jam or wanted a more formal audition.

  Elizabeth answered the door in something black, a color so obvious and easy, a shorthand for cool. Why hadn’t I thought to wear black? I looked clean-cut in comparison, and like I might be there to deliver pizza or ask her to save the whales. I was then offered a beer. It was midday. I was at the age where I only drank to get drunk and alcohol was something I still snuck from my dad, usually a blend of five different alcohols skimmed from the liquor cabinet and then diluted with Coke inside a giant plastic cup from a fast-food restaurant giveaway. Sitting around sipping a beer in the daylight felt wrong, and I wasn’t even sure I liked beer if it wasn’t being poured down my throat, circumventing my taste buds via beer bong.

  I sank into a couch, which only made me feel smaller and even less capable. Elizabeth talked a little about Stefanie and the day of the funeral. It was odd to be privy to what I considered a private matter, or a public one that I’d only read about in the papers—the death of a friend, a bandmate. I felt grown-up to be considered a temporary confidante but immature in the way I couldn’t wait to tell my friends.

  Then the singer, Selene, came over. This felt promising. I was being checked out, examined. Selene had a raspy voice and was all muscle shirt and sinew and messed-up hair. Suddenly, my oversized T-shirt seemed even bigger and whiter. There I was, a puffy cloud on a couch, surrounded by women who were so clearly thunder and lightning, and I wasn’t even drinking a beer. I left knowing that they would never ask me to be in 7 Year Bitch.

  Yet in my youthful ignorance and optimism I was determined to stay positive. I felt hopeful. That hope was quickly diminished when Elizabeth called me the next day and told me it wasn’t going to work. She said I was too young and that the band played a lot of bar shows. I still didn’t want to give up or let go; it didn’t seem fair. I felt like this might be my only chance to be in a band, a real band. So, I did what any teenage girl would do: I wrote a letter wherein I compared myself to the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante. Frusciante had joined the Chili Peppers when he was eighteen or nineteen. And even though he was a genius guitar player, a true wunderkind, and I only knew a couple of chords, I felt like the comparison just might work. Not only was I likening myself to a virtuouso guitarist, but I was also displaying gumption and guts—at least that’s what I thought. I would charm my way into this band, if not with my J.Crew outfits, then with savvy.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t end the letter there. I
nstead, I bared my soul. As in the letters I had written to soap stars and teenage heartthrobs in elementary school and junior high, I told Elizabeth about my entire life: how I didn’t get along with my parents, about my mom leaving, the whole maudlin story. People think that the digital age and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter nurture oversharing, but in 1992 there was nothing stopping me from treating any piece of paper like a personal diary. I wanted so badly to be taken to some special place, to be asked into a secret club that would transform my life. I felt like music was that club. And to see inside for a moment and then be asked to leave was devastating.

  During the next few months I occasionally ran into Elizabeth at Seattle shows and music festivals like 107.7’s End Fest. She was always kind to me but I had clearly become a pest. Later, when I knew what it felt like to carry the weight of your fans’ aspirations, I would remember the way Elizabeth looked at me after I’d sent the letter: a look of pity, distrust, and weariness. There is a gulf of misunderstanding between musicians and their fans, and often so much desperation that the musician can’t possibly assuage, rectify, or heal. You feel helpless and you feel guilty. With Sleater-Kinney fans I tried to be generous, but I soon grew uneasy. For a long while I could share nothing more than the music itself. I think I was too scared to be open with the fans because I knew how bottomless their need could be. How could I help if I was just like them? I was afraid I might not be able to lessen their pain or live up to their ideals; I would be revealed as a fraud, unworthy and insubstantial. The disconnect between who I was on- and offstage would be so pronounced as to be jarring. Me, so small, so unqualified.